Buried in Snow

So last Friday night we had yet MORE snow. I'm not sure exactly how much fell, but judging by the amount on our table outside, and on our deck, I would have to say at least half a meter. Probably more. This meant that a lot of ski runs were closed over the w/e due to the high avalanche risk.

 Our deck - with the snow almost half-way up the windows!

Dude, where's my car?

It's a new thing for me, living in an avalanche zone. Montreal is wonderfully free from most threats of natural disasters (aside from some occasional, phenomenal ice storms) but here the risk of avalanche is very real, and taken very seriously.
So it seems our chalet is exactly on the line of the high-risk avalanche zone - in fact, according to Lesley, our bedroom is actually in the zone while the rest of the chalet is just on the other side of the line (so maybe we should change our sleeping place...). She asked a local expert just how real the threat is, and according to him, it would take some very big dumps of snow that then become very smooth (check), followed by some very big dumps of wet, heavy snow (check), and then for the weather conditions to stop the helicopters from going up and setting off the 'controlled' avalanches with their explosives. (The muffled but loud 'booms' of these charges is a constant backdrop to the ski season here it seems.) Hmmm...
The new snow did make skiing on Saturday for the kids in their clubs quite the challenge. As ever, only Les Houches was open, and so it was the usual chaos. And Zoe's little class got stranded on the mountain and had to get rescued by snowmobile! Poor things, they'd gone down a run to a teleski (a button lift, basically), but the snow conditions were so challenging that the kids couldn't get up it with falling down. And they couldn't ski down. So they were stranded, and from all accounts, the staff from Les Houches were completely unhelpful, wouldn't let an adult take a kid up with them on the lift, and refused to send in the snowcat until the pistes were completely closed, at close to 5pm. Their only suggestion was for the four-year-old kids to walk up, carrying their skis! Which they started to do. So Zoe didn't come down off the mountain until it was almost dark, in the rain, at 5.30pm. But bless Zoe, she came off the bubble car all smiles, telling me what fun she'd had on the snowmobile. It was a big adventure to her. She hadn't even noticed they'd been stuck. Her poor teacher was close to tears though, and has declared that they will never go skiing at Les Houches again.
In other news, I'm very excited because we've just booked a summer holiday in Corsica! 'La Corse' clearly occupies a very special place in the hearts of the French, because everyone tells us we must visit, and so we're whisking the kids out of school in the first week of June (what the heck) and we're going to drive to Corsica for a week in the sun on the beach. I've just booked a little chalet, with a great terrace overlooking the sea, and a lovely shared pool. Supposedly July and August are crazy busy and very hot, but June should be lovely. We're not doing a huge amount of travelling while we're here - basically because we're enjoying this very beautiful place in the Alps and want to make the most of it here - but I'm excited to explore Corsica a bit. It's an opportunity that's not going to come again very soon.